>Thought is certainly associated with change of state, but can't be reduced to it.
You can effectively reduce continuously dynamic systems to discreet steps. Sure, you can always say that the "magic" exists between the arbitrarily small steps, but from a practical POV there is no difference.
A transistor has a binary on or off. A neuron might have ~infinite~ levels of activation.
But in reality the ~infinite~ activation level can be perfectly modeled (for all intents and purposes), and computers have been doing this for decades now (maybe not with neurons, but equivalent systems). It might seem like an obvious answer, that there is special magic in analog systems that binary machines cannot access, but that is wholly untrue. Science and engineering have been extremely successful interfacing with the analog reality we live in, precisely because the digital/analog barrier isn't too big of a deal. Digital systems can do math, and math is capable of modeling analog systems, no problem.
You can effectively reduce continuously dynamic systems to discreet steps. Sure, you can always say that the "magic" exists between the arbitrarily small steps, but from a practical POV there is no difference.
A transistor has a binary on or off. A neuron might have ~infinite~ levels of activation.
But in reality the ~infinite~ activation level can be perfectly modeled (for all intents and purposes), and computers have been doing this for decades now (maybe not with neurons, but equivalent systems). It might seem like an obvious answer, that there is special magic in analog systems that binary machines cannot access, but that is wholly untrue. Science and engineering have been extremely successful interfacing with the analog reality we live in, precisely because the digital/analog barrier isn't too big of a deal. Digital systems can do math, and math is capable of modeling analog systems, no problem.